Large Multimodal Models as Social Multimedia Analysis Engines

Recent research has offered insights into the extraordinary capabilities of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) in various general vision and language tasks. There is growing interest in how LMMs perform in more specialized domains. Social media content, inherently multimodal, blends text, images, videos, and sometimes audio. To effectively understand such content, models need to interpret the intricate interactions between these diverse communication modalities and their impact on the conveyed message. Understanding social multimedia content remains a challenging problem for contemporary machine learning frameworks. In this talk, we evaluate GPT-4V(ision)'s capabilities for social multimedia analysis. We select five representative tasks, including sentiment analysis, hate speech detection, fake news identification, demographic inference, and political ideology detection, to evaluate GPT-4V. Our investigation begins with a preliminary quantitative analysis for each task using existing benchmark datasets, followed by a careful review of the results and a selection of qualitative samples that illustrate GPT-4V's potential in understanding multimodal social media content. GPT-4V demonstrates remarkable efficacy in these tasks, showcasing strengths such as joint understanding of image-text pairs, contextual and cultural awareness, and extensive commonsense knowledge. In addition to the known hallucination problem, notable challenges remain as GPT-4V struggles with tasks involving multilingual social multimedia comprehension and has difficulties in generalizing to the latest trends in social media. We further present several attempts to improve the performance on some tasks. The insights gleaned from our findings underscore a promising future for LMMs in enhancing our comprehension of social media content and its users through the analysis of multimodal information.